Forty-year-old Ramesh Chandra runs a small steel furniture shop in Nandganj, a town to the east of Varanasi, in Uttar Pradesh’s Ghazipur district. He also makes small iron boxes and runs a workshop that employs six people. Ramesh’s wife Rukmini, 38, is an equal partner, who helps run the show if Ramesh has to be away for a while. Till last year, it was usually bank work that would keep Ramesh away, often for more than a couple of hours at a time.

However, this year there has been a welcome change, after a payment bank opened next door. Chandra and Rukmini now get doorstep banking. In fact, Rukmini has taken charge of savings and investments of the family and the six employees now get their wages in their own bank accounts. While Fino PayTech is the payment bank helping Ramesh and Rukmini, more new-age banking players have forayed into Nandganj. Financial inclusion riding on easy availability of data services has made its presence felt here — while the journey to Varanasi, barely 60 km away, still takes more than two hours. For Rukmini and Ramesh, India has travelled to their Bharat, not by road but through banking.

The idea of building a country is often tied to the creation of infrastructure: the temples of modern India that Jawaharlal Nehru spoke about. However, today nation-building has started to mean much more than large infrastructure projects. Metaphorical pipes bringing in data and financial literacy are as important as those carrying water, gas or petroleum. Sometimes they actually share space: for example, optical fibre cables laid under railway tracks. But are new-age financial services players like Fino or Paytm, ecommerce ventures like Flipkart or Amazon and data evangelists like Google or Reliance Jio also helping build our country? Can their very different kind of contribution hold a candle to Indian private sector behemoths likes Larsen & Toubro (L&T) or Tata Steel, which built steel plants, power plants, ports, airports, tollroads and bridges — and in the process helped products and services reach underdeveloped areas?

L&T chairman AM Naik has an answer, in his own inimitable style: “In our generation, it was always the country first, then the society, then company and lastly self. We had the vision of working for the country. New-age entrepreneurs are constantly talking about valuation. Maybe only one out of 10 are thinking about the country.”

From Pariahs to PartnersTo understand the psyche of the new-age entrepreneur vis-a-vis the Nehruvian notion of nation-building, rewind to the early ’90s, when economic liberalisation was ushered in by the Narasimha Rao government with Manmohan Singh as finance minister. Most large infrastructure sectors were the preserve of the public sector till then. Naik himself recalls how he had unsuccessfully sought an offshore licence “52 times” before the offshore sector was finally opened up.

JJ Irani, former Tata Steel managing director and vice-chairman, told ET Magazine that the country’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru thought profit was a dirty word. “I have heard it from JRD Tata. Though JRD and Nehru were friends, Nehru had a very different vision for the country.” Irani recalls how large government factories, built with Soviet help, would lie unused, but the private sector was never allowed to use them as there was no trust.

Irani says the governments of the ’60s and ’70s built tariff walls to prevent foreign businesses entering into India. “They wanted to keep the wolves out, but they ended up preventing Indian tigers from conquering the world.” Irani points out that as a result when the economy was opened up, the Indian private sector was ill-prepared. “You will recall all the television makers, including Tata’s Nelco, went out of business when the foreign companies came in.” RPG Group chairman Harsh Goenka recalls how the group engaged McKinsey to understand what it needs to do to survive, and the main recommendation was to prune its portfolio of 18 businesses to six. “At that time, even selling a business was taboo; we had a lot to learn,” says Goenka.

“Only in the last 20 years the Indian private sector has had some say,” says Naik. This is also the period when it has contributed to nationbuilding. Business sectors like oil and gas, aviation, telecom, steel, power generation saw huge growth. In the last 16 years, India’s road network went up from 33 lakh km to 54 lakh km, becoming the second largest in the world. In the last 10 years, India’s tele-density went up from 14.6% to 82%. India’s installed power generation capacity went up from 85 GW in 1997 to 330 GW in 2017. Aviation passenger traffic grew from mere 15,000 in 1990 to 100 million in 2016.

With growing business came greater profitability and corporate philanthropy. Education, healthcare, water and sanitation were focus areas, with the private sector outspending Indian public sector by three times. Total CSR spend in India exceeded Rs 5,000 crore in 2015.

The Tata Trusts are one of the oldest and have been around for more than eight decades and control the Tata empire. Other foundations created by private sector like the ones by Wipro chairman Azim Premji or Reliance Industries or Infosys also pushed boundaries with their work. Naik, on the verge of moving on to a non-executive chairman’s role at L&T, has pledged 75% of his personal wealth for philanthropy. He also heads five trusts focused on philanthropy: while two are personal, another two are L&T employees’ trusts and the last , an L&T company trust.

Leapfrogging for BharatWhile the old-economy stalwarts often reached out to the lesser developed parts of the country through CSR, entrepreneurs of the day seem to be reaching out with ideas and products tailored for the other India, or Bharat. Entrepreneurship zeal is helping solve problems with innovative solutions, leapfrogging western developmental models with innovation.

Take for example Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder of Paytm and the poster-boy of digital payments. Paytm started as a mobile wallet and is now a payments bank. Sharma feels technology will be at the heart of the future and success will not be measured by size but by future readiness. In the case of Paytm, this meant quickly growing a company that provided just payment solutions for 250 million people into a banking offering that can shake up the old guard.

So how is he contributing to the cause of nation-building? The short answer from Sharma would be, by building innovative solutions to the country’s problems. Sharma explains: “The old business idea of banking was replicated on a costly western model, which excluded a billion people from accessing basic banking services.” And then, answering the question raised by Naik, Sharma adds: “We are building a business that doesn’t exist anywhere in the world and will provide a low-cost, scalable solution to dramatically improve financial inclusion.”

Financial inclusion itself has to ride on digital and data inclusion. Reliance Industries has pushed big money into the data sector — an example of an old-economy giant riding a new horse. Internet search behemoth Google’s India chief Rajan Anandan says Google has taken upon itself a mission to provide Internet connectivity to a billion Indians. “To make the internet accessible for around a billion people, the solutions are going to look completely different from those used by the first 100 million users.”

Facebook and Microsoft also have similar projects to build connectivity across India. And, in that battle, lower smartphone handset prices are another enabler — where Reliance Industries has made its latest push, offering a feature phone with basic internet, virtually for free. Fino CEO Rishi Gupta says he noted, during a visit to Nandganj, that Ramesh and Rukmini’s 15-year-old son is an active smartphone user and Gupta has identified the child as a future vehicle for pushing more sophisticated banking services.

Google has moved further with initiatives like Internet Saathi, which trains women in rural areas on the internet. Ten million have been trained in 2,00,000 villages already. Free wi-fi is likely to go live at 200 railway stations by the end of this year. The stage is now set for made-for-Bharat products. Google itself has started a local language push, offline apps and voice search. It is also working with small businesses to bring them online.

Anandan says: “India is now the land of a billion opportunities, with massive white spaces — we need to build from the ground up.” He adds that for India’s new nation builders, the solutions for the next billion Indians for healthcare, education or transportation will look completely different from what’s in the market.

And government services are also running on the internet. Internet gear maker Cisco believes that the internet is changing the way people interact with the government. “The focus has to be on providing government services at scale to citizens,” says VC Gopalratnam, SVP-IT and CIO-International, Cisco. “There’s an opportunity for the next generation of nation builders to use the internet across other sectors such as education, healthcare, and transportation.”

The larger conglomerates also have their job cut out. Naik of L&T says the private sector should be allowed to play a larger role with the government just providing the enabling infrastructure.

Goenka feels little has been done in increasing agricultural productivity and identifies it as the one area where India lags behind. “The concept of small is beautiful, has not been able to deliver agri-productivity and the private sector must look for a way in which it can play a larger role, which is tough without land ownership,” he says. Goenka adds one of the tasks ahead is to find a viable model for partnering with the farming community that can lead to less fragmented land holdings and therefore greater productivity. For Ramesh and Rukmini of Nandganj, that will also mean more demand and a better future.

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